Iran’s military is claiming to have brought down the drone with electronics countermeasures that confused the systems onboard controls. Based on the footage, which shows the machine in pristine shape, it appears to be true. I’m leaning towards the Iranians on this one. You know why? This is because we have a history of atrocious military IT systems.

“The reason that the transmissions could be picked up easily by a cheap satellite recording program? They were broadcast in the clear between the drone and ground control. That’s right—no encryption was used.

Perhaps, you might be thinking to yourself in a mental bid to make the military seem competent here, no one could have suspected this would happen. But they did suspect it, because it had been happening for a decade already. The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, included this tidbit in its report: “The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The US government has known about the flaw since the US campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it, the officials said.”

Wow. We really thought that nobody would figure this out? That’s right, they’re all just a bunch of bearded morons riding around on goats and exchanging messages via papyrus, right? What a blatant lack of situational awareness. A first year computer science student could figure this out.

The best part is that we have tremendous, publicly available encryption standards, like AES and Blowfish, that would take all of the super computers in the world working around the clock for a 100 years to break. Instead, we secure these things with less forethought than DIRECTV uses to keep you from pirating cable.